In a municipality where the median price of a detached house is now $3.1 million, councillors Mary-Ann Booth and Craig Cameron began finding innovative ways to fight against property speculation, both domestic and foreign, despite being restricted by limited municipal powers.

West Vancouver councillor Mary-Ann Booth began early to challenge the offshore-driven rapid rise in housing prices in her seaside municipality.Arlen Redekop /
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For Booth, the battle began in 2014, when an Asian realtor in West Vancouver came to her with three years worth of data she had collected on how the housing market was rapidly skewing in the hillside municipality, where residents routinely elect centre-right provincial and federal politicians. The realtor provided evidence that buyers with non-Anglicized Asian names were dominating the market.

At open houses for the most expensive properties, observed Booth, Cameron and realtors, up to four out of five potential buyers were speaking Mandarin or Farsi, with some at times each buying two or three houses. Livable homes and decorative trees were being mowed down, replaced by “big, square monstrosities” that often went empty or under-utilized, Cameron said. A recent count revealed 1,700 detached homes in West Vancouver are unoccupied, about one-tenth of the entire stock.

“We could observe all this happening before our eyes. You’d have to be hiding your head in the sand not to see it. We are a microcosm study of the housing issue at the high end,” said Booth.

The long-time councillor and former school trustee laments the painful irony that West Vancouver’s population has been slowly declining ­­— with many long-time, middle-class residents cashing out, and the young leaving — while prices are rising in response to increased demand by investors and well-off newcomers.

West Vancouver council member Craig Cameron says the unaffordability predicament – with its attendant problem of wealthy speculators engaging in various tax-avoidance schemes – âis not a right-left issue.âHandout /
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Booth has also seen revealing demographic changes in West Vancouver’s schools. Census figures show the number of West Vancouver residents with English as a mother tongue has declined by almost 3,000 since 2011, while the number with Mandarin as a first language has jumped by 3,600, with Farsi speakers also rising by 365.

In a small municipality like West Vancouver, people notice what’s going on on the ground, says Booth.

“We’re like a little speedboat compared to the freighter that is the City of Vancouver,” which has a population of 650,000.

West Vancouver is not as politically polarized as Vancouver, where the so-called “west side” of the city equals the suburb of West Vancouver in regards to ultra-wealthy real estate investors and a “severe” unaffordability ratio (of housing costs to median wages) of 13 to one, worse than New York City.

City of Vancover politicians were slow to respond to the unaffordability and empty homes crisis that struck west-side neighbourhoods like Kerrisdale, MacKenzie Heights and Dunbar, say critics, in part because of long-term tensions between the interests of voters on the west side of Vancouver and those on the somewhat less-expensive east side.

To Cameron, however, the affordability predicament — with its attendant problem of wealthy speculators engaging in various tax-avoidance schemes — “is not a right-left issue.” As a card-carrying provincial and federal Liberal party member, he has been disappointed by the B.C. Liberals’ approach to the crisis.

Even the fiscally conservative mayor of West Vancouver, Mike Smith, has tried to cool prices for the past two years by asking the former B.C. Liberal government to allow municipalities to charge higher property taxes for non-resident owners. After all, Smith says, as a Canadian, he has to pay higher taxes than Americans on his vacation home in Hawaii.

According to Integrity B.C., a watchdog organization, West Vancouver councillors accepted about $4,000 in donations from the property development industry in 2014.

That’s lower than the $62,000 in real-estate money hauled in by candidates running in the nearby City of North Vancouver, and a pittance compared to the $2.3 million in developers money recently accepted by mayoral and councillor candidates in the City of Vancouver. (See charts below.)

Another turning point in West Vancouver council’s frustrating battle against unaffordability came in early 2016, when Booth told council about her happenstance discovery that Westbank Corp., one of B.C.’s biggest developers, had posted ads in Hong Kong for its luxury condominium complex in Horseshoe Bay — before council had even approved the project.

“I went apoplectic. And so did everyone on council,” said Cameron.

An artist’s rendering of the Horsehoe Bay project of Westbank Corp., which began marketing its 158 luxury suites in Hong Kong before West Vancouver council had even approved the development.PNG

Cameron, Booth and council responded by following the lead of London, England, and pushing for a “locals first” policy on the 158-unit Westbank tower complex.

Although Cameron acknowledged West Vancouver’s “locals-first” policy is modest, almost impossible to enforce, and doesn’t stop flippers, it at least makes clear what West Vancouver council is aspiring to as it tries to increase the supply of (admittedly expensive) condos and struggles, with few legislative tools, to reduce offshore and speculative demand.

To that end, Cameron and Booth launched another bold effort. In 2016, they went to the Union of B.C. Municipalities with a resolution that asked the then-B.C. Liberal government to “give local governments the powers under the Community Charter to implement measures to address (foreign capital in the housing market), such as the power to introduce a non-resident property tax rate, as exists in other jurisdictions.” After some rigmarole, the UBCM executive eventually endorsed their resolution in 2017, but its fate remains up in the air.

The high end of the housing market in West Vancouver is finally starting to soften, says Cameron. That is in part because the federal and provincial governments may be cracking down on tax evasion by rich speculators. But he doesn’t imagine his district is going to see house prices drop to anywhere near the Canadian average of $500,000 (a figure greatly inflated by the markets of Toronto and Metro Vancouver).

Meanwhile, Cameron and Booth both point to how traffic congestion has become the most recent manifestation of West Vancouver’s housing crisis. Traffic jams have become severe on the North Shore in part because few people who hold jobs in the region can afford to buy or rent homes in it, forcing them to make bridge-crossing commutes every day. Many small businesses are reporting they may have to leave.

“At the rate we’re going,” said Booth, “we’ll soon end up as a resort town — or a ghost town.”

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